hammerspace

We used this model to distribute translations, feature flags, configuration, search indexes, etc at Airbnb. But instead of SQLite we used Sparkey, a KV file format developed by Spotify. In early years there was a Cron job on every box that pulled that service’s thingies; then once we switched to Kubernetes we used a deamomset & host tagging (taints?) to pull a variety of thingies to each host and then ensure the services that use the thingies only ran on the hosts that had the thingies. In Ruby we called this “hammerspace” https://github.com/airbnb/hammerspace

Ah yes! For the Rails monolith the sparkey integration was accomplished through https://github.com/airbnb/hammerspace

At Airbnb we are implementing translation serving on top of Sparkey; part of our Ruby system open sourced here: https://github.com/airbnb/hammerspace The way the system worked (iirc it’s been a while): we’d periodically dump all the translation strings from our translation editor app (MySQL backed) into a sparkey S3 path, and use a Kubernetes daemonset to fetch the sparkey file to each host in the cluster. Finally application pods written in any language use a host volume to read translation strings from the local sparkey file. Certainly overkill for smaller apps but with a bunch of services and hundreds of thousands of translation strings, the out of band updates are well worth it and keep the app container small.